NBC rebooting Remington Steele as a half-hour comedy

No doubt reminded of the character’s charms when we brought him in to play us for this Newswire, NBC has ordered a reboot of Remington Steele, the 1980s series in which each week Pierce Brosnan unwrapped the mystery of a new, dashing suit. The updated Remington Steele will actually be a sequel, concerning as it does Olivia Holt, the daughter of Brosnan and Stephanie Zimbalist’s characters from the original, only this time repackaged as a half-hour comedy. In the contemporary version, Holt reopens the detective agency that her mother ran with the help of a con man who pretended to be her male superior—as this was the 1980s, an era when women were incapable of detecting anything without the aid of a handsome man making wry comments—and soon finds herself falling into “the same hilarious, action-packed, romantic entanglements of her parents,” even though today’s women are technically capable of solving crimes without the help of someone they might eventually kiss.

Zombieland’s Ruben Fleischer is set to executive produce and direct the pilot, which so far doesn’t have the promise of an appearance from either Brosnan or Zimbalist. But you have to have someone named “Remington Steele,” otherwise it’s not really Remington Steele, right? Can the new Remington Steele be a robot? He already has a robot name.